


the gallery of our bones

by ryyves



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: And the fallout thereof, Gen, Lily's Wright On days, Sibling conflict, The disappearance of Jack Wright, pre-King Falls Chronicles Part One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:01:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24024745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: It’s far from the last email Lily gets about King Falls. Sometimes the name is hidden in postscripts, sometimes bright as highways at midnight, and every time it catches in Lily’s heart like a frightened canary, yellow and waning.Lily doesn’t delete them, not one. She files them away in a quiet folder of her work email, so she doesn’t have to see them in her inbox. There are things that can be said with distance, and this is one of them: that if she deleted every mention of King Falls, she would delete every rope thrown to Jack. Every hope, or something that runs even deeper.Some fear, perhaps, that she is not where she is supposed to be.Or: Pippa puts up with way more of Lily's shit than she should have to.
Relationships: Jack Wright & Lily Wright, Lily Wright & Pippa James
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	the gallery of our bones

**Author's Note:**

> The Jack to my Lily is sick so I'm having a lot of Lily Feels. The Jack to my Lily also recommended I write a one-shot. Here we are. I've been writing a lot of poetry for my final-year portfolio, but I finally fucking wrote Lily.
> 
> Title from Michael Wasson's [To Memorize the Continuous Lines of Your Bones [An American Lullaby]](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/151530/to-memorize-the-continuous-lines-of-your-bones-an-american-lullaby)

Lily is checking her email absently from bed when she sees the message. Through the thin hotel curtains, the greying dawn falls over her fingers, over her phone screen bright as a star. She has to keep blinking just to focus on the words. Every word she reads is another word forgotten by the time she steps out of the shower, but she likes to go through them over breakfast anyway, unless she and Pippa have an appointment, an interview or a meeting with some name she’d barely managed to get a hold of on the phone.

The email that pulls her up short is titled: _KING FALLS?_

_Hey, Wright On. I’m sure you’ve come across this s…_

She stills, and carefully evens out her breath. It is still night somewhere in this country, the sun still not risen, which means she is breathing too loud.

Something in the name doesn’t sit right, sits like a stone thrown in a river. Her stomach, or maybe her heard, like a stone in a river, and all the words in the body of the email she is not opening. She knows that name, King Falls, knows it the way she would know a heart murmur, and something in it would kill her just as fast.

She holds her finger over the email and sees it shaking. She fills in the words: _this small town known for its paranormal happenings._

Ugh. She’d better not start filling in her fans’ words, email language ubiquitous in any part of the world. Give an inch and the world takes a mile.

 _This tiny Americana nightmare,_ more like. That would do it, she thinks.

There is no one beside her on her little whitewashed single bed, but Pippa, across the room, is stretching like the early bird she is. The little alarm clock they carry with them to every hotel they crash in, to give a sense of familiarity, reads 6:04. For a moment, she can’t remember where she is, why she’s in a hotel and not in her own apartment or Pippa’s guest room.

Lily archives the email and pulls a perfectly white pillow over her head. Pippa says, her voice muffled through the pillow, “Not slacking on the job, I hope?”

“Not a chance,” grumbles Lily.

“Well, okay, because you said you wanted to wrap this up today.”

Lily puts up her middle finger, and Pippa laughs, clear and high. “I do.”

“Try aiming next time,” says Pippa, “unless you were trying to flip off that ugly wall painting.”

“It is a hideous painting,” Lily concedes, and pulls the pillow off her face.

Lily takes her time getting ready for breakfast, showers while Pippa goes down to take advantage of the buffet. The water is too cold, and Lily leaves too much conditioner in her hair. But it’s rhythmic and quiet, and it takes her thoughts away from heartbeats for a few minutes.

When Lily turns the water off, the hotel room is quiet, light seeping under the bathroom door. It’s a little too cold for this time of year, a little too big for just her alone. She dresses in the bathroom and walks through the room towel-drying her hair. She leaves her phone plugged in on the bedside table, but she keeps looking at it anyway.

“Did you see that email we got?” Pippa says when she comes back. She squats before her suitcase and unzips it, setting aside her kit and a pair of wrinkled clothes.

“Got a lot of emails,” says Lily, far too nonchalantly.

“Yeah,” says Pippa, her back still to Lily. “Have you considered going to King Falls?”

Lily’s heart stutters. “It’s a waste of our time, Pip. There are plenty of places with real stories. Plus, we can’t be everywhere in the world at once.”

Pippa shrugs and rises. “Guess you’re saying you did get the email, and it’s a firm _no_.”

“You would be correct.”

“Mind if I ask why?”

“I’m not interested,” Lily says flatly. “I have nothing to say about ghost stories.”

“No skin off my back,” says Pippa, and closes the bathroom door.

But Lily thinks about the email all through the interview, her mouth moving but her heart still as a stone. If a word could set her shivering, then, damn, she’s weaker than she thought.

And that evening, eating takeaway on Pippa’s bed in the dark and pretending she isn’t dropping noodles in her lap, Lily takes out her phone and pulls up the email. Someone is saying something in her head and she can’t quite remember it around all the radio static, some voice she knew once, a long time ago, before the rush of first-job-after-college wore off and left her serious and tired.

The email reads: _Hey, Wright On. I’m sure by now you’ve come across this sleepy little mountain town by the name of King Falls. It’s really made a name for itself, despite the fact that I can’t name a single person of any regard who’s come out of there. I don’t know if I believe in it myself, and I know you’re more a nitty-gritty sort of podcast, but I’d really like to hear the professional Wright On take on all the weird shit we’ve all heard about this town. Mission: Apparition doesn’t quite cut it, you know?_

That’s it. No more formalities, no pleasantries, not a plea or a beg but a straightforward request. Practical as anything. Lily’s conscience wouldn’t twinge for a second, deleting the email and forgetting about it. If she could forget about it.

Lily turns her phone all the way off and tosses it across the gap and onto her bed. She turns so she doesn’t have to look at it.

“We can’t just do whatever the listeners want,” Lily informs Pippa. Pippa reaches her fork into Lily’s plastic bowl and pulls out a big chunk of tofu, and Lily tries to swat her hand away. “We’ve got journalistic integrity to uphold, Pip, remember?”

“You’re the most infuriating person I’ve ever known,” says Pippa affectionately.

“It’s my superpower.”

“I’m going to eat all your tofu, Miss Infuriating-Not-Phenomenal-Journalist,” Pippa tells her.

“That name had better not catch on.”

Pippa winks. “We’ll see about that. So what do you say? Should we consider relocating to King Falls for a month?”

Lily sighs around a mouthful of noodle. She speaks with her mouth full. “I’m trying to drop hints here, Pip. I’m far more interested in Australia than some creepy mountain town.”

“We’re going to have to talk about your Australian aspirations, because me and bugs do not mix.”

“Nah, we’ll just bring Shannon along to take care of them.”

“You’re horrible,” laughs Pippa, and by the time they go to bed, neither of them thinking much of the email or a town whose name Lily is already forgetting.

* * *

It’s far from the last email Lily gets about King Falls. Sometimes the name is hidden in postscripts, sometimes bright as highways at midnight, and every time it catches in Lily’s heart like a frightened canary, yellow and waning.

Lily doesn’t delete them, not one. She files them away in a quiet folder of her work email, so she doesn’t have to see them in her inbox. There are things that can be said with distance, and this is one of them: that if she deleted every mention of King Falls, she would delete every rope thrown to Jack. Every hope, or something that runs even deeper.

Some fear, perhaps, that she is not where she is supposed to be.

The winter holidays approach and Lily’s intern goes home for good, with a strong recommendation from both Pippa and herself and prospects in Milwaukee. It always feels good to send someone into a bright world, even if they tired of working with Lily by the end and she tired of them. It always hurts to see her college self in their eyes, her weary self in their around-the-block eyes.

Lily has just gotten out of an interview with a potential new intern, Pippa at home with her wife while Lily works as long as she possibly can before the year drops off and leaves her with herself. She has a spreadsheet she updates weekly. Pippa laughs at her about it, of course, because Pippa’s the producer and that’s her job, but it helps Lily feel on top of things.

Lily’s life is a balancing act, sneakers on an ice floe, a hungry Arctic.

When Pippa answers the phone, Lily can practically feel the steam-filled kitchen. She can see the hand-embroidered aprons, the pinwheels in the fridge and molasses cookies on the rack, the kitchen dizzy with light and bright smiles.

“Merry Christmas,” says Lily.

Pippa laughs. “Merry Christmas, yourself. Shannon, say hi to Lily.”

There’s a shuffling, then a sweet voice, lower than Pippa’s, says, “How are you doing, Lily?”

“Not too shabby,” says Lily. “You taking good care of my producer?”

“Only the best,” Shannon laughs.

When Pippa takes the phone back, Lily says, “Look, I don’t want to be the obnoxious third wheel, but do you mind if I come over for the day sometime soon?”

Pippa laughs, and it’s so warm it hurts. “Oh my God, Lily. If you want to help me and Shannon out with the cookies, why don’t you just come over now.”

“I’m there yesterday, got it.”

She is still listening to Pippa’s laughter when she hangs up.

Pippa’s house is warm, with yellowish wood paneling and an open floor plan. It’s the sort of house that looks more expensive than it is, although no money in the world could buy what Pippa and Shannon have. Lily looks at them all evening, over dough and oil and sprinkles, the grins and the playful intimacy and the horrible moment they feed each other still-warm cookies.

With three trays still in the oven, Lily loads a plate with an assortment of everything Pippa and Shannon spent the day making and meets them in the living room. Shannon has her head tucked in the crook of Pippa’s arm on the small sofa—the loveseat, really, and of course they’d have one—which means she’s the one who reaches out for the cookies.

Lily curls up in the armchair, because it’s a curling-up sort of day, and savors the strings of fairy lanterns in the back yard through the big windows. Their reflections bounce back at them, punctuated by the yellow orbs: Lily looking at herself out the window and Pippa looking at her in person.

It’s nice to have a family.

Lily hasn’t dated someone, not seriously, for years; hasn’t been in one place for long enough to settle down, hasn’t settled for texts and video calls and proclamations of love frozen in time and permanent, the way spoken words never have to be.

And, okay, maybe it’s too much to look at.

“Have you been getting… fan mail?” Lily asks instead. She doesn’t want to put a name on it.

“You’re the face of Wright On, Lil. I’m not the one who gets fan mail.”

“Well, you should, because you’re what makes the podcast run. But I mean, like, you know those emails or letters we sometimes get—well, get a lot, actually—where people think they know where we should go and what stories we should cover?”

“What’s got you so worked up?”

“I just want us to be on the same page,” says Lily. “That page being, we are _not_ going to King Falls.”

“Surely you two have plenty of time to cover anything you want to,” says Shannon.

“Thanks, Shannon, but I can deal with my own bitter, abrasive—”

“Wonderful,” adds Lily.

“Wonderful on-air talent. Look, Lily, it’s the holidays. I don’t know why you’re so worked up about this, but we don’t have to talk about it. Okay? Just enjoy the evening, and don’t think about work or your devoted fans.”

The oven beeps. Lily says, “I’ll get that,” half-risen before Shannon can extract herself from Pippa’s arms.

Pippa gets sleepy first, giggly and glutted on cookies, and Lily twists on the armchair and watches Shannon help her up off the couch and go with her into the bedroom. It’s a strange ritual, but Lily shrugs and lets them go.

Their voices go soft behind the door. Lily can’t help but try to listen in, the door open, Pippa saying, “Make sure Lily doesn’t eat all the cookies,” and Shannon saying, “I’d like to see her try.”

Pippa saying, “Lily doesn’t usually care a lick about what anyone thinks of her,” and Shannon saying, “Are you okay?”

And that’s why Shannon followed her.

Pippa says, “Yeah, I just… I don’t know. It’s a situation.”

Lily takes a loud bite of cookie and chews with her mouth open.

“I’m gonna marry that woman,” says Shannon when she comes back a few minutes later. “Drink?”

“Nah. Well, maybe some more milk.”

Shannon takes Lily’s glass and refills it, and then pours herself some Bailey’s. Another strange habit, but not one that Lily’s unfamiliar with: nights she’d drink cocktails while Jack wasn’t looking at her, or nights before that, in college, when she’d drink beer and Jack would put on dinner.

Lily wants to ask, _How do you hold onto a family when all you have are claws? How do you call something yours and know it will stay when your heart is a bucket upturned, a glacial melt? How do you know where to put your hands, how to name the thing, how to know the thing wants to be named?_

She wants to ask, _When does the fear stop?_

But the fear is bigger than her mouth and she does not want to be cruel. Lily knows she is harder to love than Pippa is, Pippa with her diplomatic eyes and her even voice, and Lily hasn’t loved a person who hasn’t said it. A woman takes off Lily’s shirt, only to find her shoulders are jagged as stones. Her brother puts the sun in his hand and Lily has to fight in the dark for a nightlight.

Within fifteen minutes, Lily is putting on her coat. Shannon fills a Tupperware container with Lily’s favorite cookies, enough cookies that Lily holds the tub like a brick. They say _Thank you, thank you, lovely to see you,_ and maybe Shannon means it, but every sound out of Lily’s mouth sounds hollow, wind whistling through the empty space of a deep cave.

Lily starts the car and looks back, her coat falling off her shoulders and the heat turned all the way up. No one is standing at the door, watching her go. She goes home.

* * *

Once it comes out in the open, King Falls, like a stray clambering damp-limbed out of a drainpipe, Lily sees it everywhere. She sees it in billboards with backdrops of mountains, coupons from the grocery store, historical documentaries that start playing on her Netflix while she’s half dozing on the couch. She brings King Falls in little envelopes between the electric and credit card bills, and sometimes she throws them away.

Every correspondence has the potential to house names like tripwires. She ripped one apart, once, to see what it felt like, layers of paper shredded in her hands, words she would never know no matter how well she fitted them back together, and she cried over it like a lost puppy.

After Jack and Sammy left, after they’d set up in their fancy new house in California and Jack stopped returning her calls, she listened to their show. Sammy’s abrasive, obnoxious voice spouted obscenities she would not doubt he’d always believed. Gone was sensitive, sweet-eyed Sammy, mild-humored in a way that set Jack wheezing but that Lily could always brush off with an eyeroll like she’d never noticed. Sammy was born for this, she thought, not for laughter-filled drive-time segments he’d spent pretending he wasn’t a second away from bolting.

Told like this, she can almost imagine his eyes dark with that hair-trigger anger always.

He had been comfortable, once, a friend and a confidante. So maybe it was the way Jack looked at him. Maybe it was the quit in Sammy’s voice those weeks leading up to their sudden departure. Maybe it just hurt, the way someone could go from best friend to stranger in the space between heartbeats. From brother to debris, no life vest.

The shape of Lily’s brother sits at her kitchen table, in the passenger seat of her car. It whispers directions like some demoniacal GPS, says _go west, go west,_ every time she tunes out the road on the way to Pippa’s.

Are we saying it like that, yet?

She almost goes west, her fingers tight on the wheel, but she is more careful than that. She holds her heart too close.

Today Pippa is designated driver, because Lily had one too many at the bar they were celebrating the release of a new episode at, the close of a tough story, too many takes, too many emotions, and not enough time to breathe. Lily hadn’t realized how tipsy she was until Pippa said, “Okay, let’s get you home,” with a hand under Lily’s arm. Lily was thinking it was late enough, a Saturday, and Sammy would be on the airwaves in Pacific Standard Time.

Pippa helps Lily into the passenger seat and buckles her in after Lily jabs the seatbelt fruitlessly. She lets Lily choose the music. Every song title Lily brings on waves of summer memories, pulls her into the shape of the apartment she shared with two boys who she would have said she loved a lifetime ago.

Pippa is wearing this thin paisley blouse over a tank top, and Lily is thinking about being in college and the unpleasantness of guy talk about ripping shirts off and the first time she ever touched a breast that wasn’t hers. She has the window all the way down, the wind blowing hair into her mouth, the stench of burnt rubber and gasoline adding to her nausea.

“You do realize it’s back to work as usual tomorrow, right?” Pippa is lecturing.

Lily makes an exaggerated gesture of displeasure. “Ah, yes, my regular nine-to-five, interrupted by my pedantic producer.”

“Shocked you didn’t say anal. Honestly, Lily, step up your game.”

“Yeah, yeah. Stepping up commencing.”

They get closer, or maybe farther away. All the lights bounce off the slick asphalt, the rain reduced to intermittent sprays.

Pippa says, as though she doesn’t know what she’s doing to Lily, her hands light on the wheel, “You know, usually the stories putter themselves out if we don’t get to them, but people have been drawing our attention to, I know, don’t say it, you don’t have to tell me, but King Falls, Lily.”

“Don’t fucking say it,” says Lily, three beats late.

“The stories aren’t going away. There’s something there. And even if there’s nothing, there’s something to debunk.”

“What do you want? I’m sure it would make for riveting reporting to go there, say, wow, what a load of baloney, and leave.”

“Who said it was a load of baloney?”

“Um,” says Lily. “Science? Reason? Facts?”

“Is this about your brother?” says Pippa. There is something in her voice that Lily slips around as she tries to pin it down, as though it’s a stone and Lily’s thoughts a waterfall.

Lily turns, slow as ice, slow as if she’d been punched. Her canary heart thrums arrhythmically in her temples, something blue and black before her eyes. Suddenly the car is a cage, a rocket capsule hurtling through black matter at speeds unknowable, windowless and dazzling.

“What?” she spits.

Pippa backtracks, her eyes on the road. “It’s just, I’ve never seen you like this. So… afraid, Lil. Not since you lost Jack.”

Lily laughs, an ugly, grandiose sound. “Afraid of a town? Come on. You know me better than that.”

“I do,” says Pippa, her eyes unnerving, in a way that says: _I see through you._ Lily shivers. “That’s why I’m asking. Leave no stone unturned and all that. The Lily I knew before your brother disappeared wouldn’t hesitate on the opportunity to tear the town to shreds. You’d give the MythBusters a run for their money.”

Lily’s teeth are clenched so hard her jaw hurts.

Pippa says, softer, “If he’s there, isn’t that a good thing?”

“Of course it’s a good thing,” says Lily, a frenetic edge to her voice. “But I’m not going to some dumb town my dumb brother thought was the center of the universe, because he was stupid.”

For a heartbeat, she thinks Pippa is going to say, _And you speak of the dead like that?_ But he’s not dead; this isn’t a world that could do that to her. To him. Bad things don’t happen to Jack Wright, golden boy.

Until they do.

“I’ve changed my mind on crashing on your couch,” Lily tells her. “Take me home.”

“Come on, Lil. I get it, and I won’t talk about Jack anymore. But you do need to think about why you’re so against going to this town. It would only take a month of our time—”

“A month of our time I don’t need to waste on fairy tales, for one, and if you’re not going to talk about him, stop talking about him.”

Pippa stops sharply at an intersection, but even though Lily can feel the weight of her gaze, she doesn’t look back.

“Yes, Pippa,” says Lily at last, pleased by the glacier of her voice. “It’s always about my brother.”

“Then I don’t see what’s holding you back.”

Lily throws up her hands just as the light turns green and the car shudders forward. “You don’t get to bring him into this conversation. Okay? He’s mine, end of discussion. And I’m not going to some town whose claim to fame is zombies and werewolves. That’s stupid and not real, and if Jack wanted to waste his time believing in that shit, that was his goddamn prerogative.” She doesn’t recognize a single street.

“I read an e-memoir about it,” Pippa says, as if this is a breakfast-table conversation, as if she is leaving out a newspaper article for Lily to read.

“Goodie,” says Lily. “Someone beat us to it. Literally, Pip, tell me, what’s the point of going if someone’s written an e-memoir? Goddamn, am I the only person in the world not taken in with this shit?” Pippa takes it in silence, and that makes Lily more frantic. Or maybe it’s the liquor. “Look, if you want to run off, too, because you’re hearing the siren call of some sideshow town, far be it from me to stop you.”

“Oh my God, Lily,” says Pippa, exasperated, and slams her hand on the side of the wheel. “I’m not running off anywhere. I have a family.”

“Didn’t stop Jack,” grumbles Lily, as Pippa pulls up in the lot of Lily’s apartment. “Doesn’t stop you flying across the country or the goddamn world every month.”

Pippa helps Lily into the elevator and unlocks the door for her. Pippa keeps taking in sharp lungfuls of breath and expelling them slowly, like she doesn’t want Lily to hear her. Lily doesn’t look up; she stumbles through the front hall in her shoes while Pippa turns the lights on. She falls back on the sofa, an arm over her eyes. It is too bright and too dark at once, a space which she little more than inhabits: a table for breakfast, a door for formalities, a window for telling time.

She always ends up on her front doorstep, head hung, watching her feet collide with the door. She always ends up in her kitchen, on her single bed in an empty apartment, watching herself turn the lights on and off and fill the space she was never meant to fill at all.

“We’re not gonna talk about my family,” Lily mumbles. “We’re not gonna talk, we’re just gonna… shh… we’re gonna be very quiet and just…”

Pippa’s voice is sweet and quiet. “Get some sleep, Lil.”

But Lily can’t fall asleep for a long time, even with tequila in her system and her head on Pippa’s soft shoulder. At some point, Pippa shifts, and Lily wakes much later to find her head on the arm of the couch, a scratchy blanket tucked up to her neck, the coffee maker dripping and no Pippa.

* * *

After Lily hung up on Sammy, midway through Jack’s name, she sat with her phone in her hands in the dark of her lonely Tampa bedroom. It was the place she downsized to after Jack and Sammy ran out, half their belongings left for her to dispose of when they flew from one coast to the other, too big for one person—everything was too big for one person, after them, even the shape of her skin—and dark with just the bedside lamp on.

Sammy was saying, _He’s gone, Lily, he’s just fucking gone, you have no idea._

And Lily was saying, walking through the dark house on quiet feet, _I don’t? I think I damn well do, Stevens, so back the fuck out of it and don’t call this number again. Don’t you ever call me again. When my brother’s done running away from you, too, he can call me himself._

It was cruel, words fashioned into the tight pyramids of knives, and she heard the way Sammy drew his breath in.

She smiled. She remembers smiling. She remembers how good it felt, to hold on to something.

Give Sammy Stevens an inch of space and he’ll take the upholstery with him when he goes. Give him your hands and he’ll leave you without them.

But when she’d hung up, she shook, her body swaying until she was crying, her body choking out hoarse sobs the size of ravens, her eyes stinging but dry, nothing in the dark but a space for grief to inhabit.

She poured herself a glass of the boxed wine in the fridge but couldn’t bring herself to swallow.

When the sky began to lighten, she dialed Pippa with shaking fingers. Tears fell all over the screen, and she kept typing it wrong. Her fingers kept spelling _Jack._

She called Jack. It rang forever, her stomach a stone or her heart, her body cold, something in her a rockslide. Something cracking, falling, turning to dust while she waited for a voice she would know, even now, as well as her own.

 _Hey,_ said Jack’s voice. _You’ve reached Jack Wright. I’m probably… well, as you can tell, I’m not looking at my phone right now, which means if you leave a message and repeat your phone number at least twice, on account of my dyscalculia, I’ll be able to call you back. Peace._

It wasn’t the same message as the last time she’d called him. He sounded happy, his voice relaxed and at ease, in a way she barely remembered him sounding. The apartment was dark and it hadn’t been a home for a long time.

“You liar,” said Lily, and it was a snarl. “Have the decency to change your goddamn answering machine before you cut and run, or up and make yourself missing person number one, you piece of shit.”

And then she hung up, and she couldn’t take it back, which was worse.

She was still staring at Jack’s number when her alarm went off in the other room, like a flashlight in the dark. It went on and on, and stopped, and went on and on again. She unbent her stiff legs, uncurled from the corner of the sofa, and went in to turn it off.

She didn’t have a single thing of Jack’s in the house. Goddamn.

“Can you check missing persons for me?” Lily hiccupped into her phone receiver a few minutes later. She’d poured the wine into the sink, made herself a cup of tea, and was seriously considering going back to the wine.

“What happened?” said Pippa.

“It’s Jack, Pippa. Can you just—they’re in L.A., can you place a call?”

“Yeah, I’ll—look, I hate to ask, but what’s got you so worried?”

Lily took a long sip of her tea, scalding her tongue on the way down. “I just—Sammy— _fuck_ Sammy—he said Jack was _gone,_ like final, end of sentence, end of life, dead or kidnapped and dead _gone._ But it was fucking Sammy, trust him as far as I can throw him, Pip, can you—?”

Pippa said, “Shh, shh, I’ll be there in a second.”

“No,” said Lily wetly. “Don’t. I’m… I’m a mess. I—I don’t want you to see me like this.”

Through the phone, Lily could hear a car door slam, and the steady whir of the garage door. “I’m coming,” said Pippa, “whether you want me to or not. You don’t have to go through this alone.”

But Lily was alone, even after she’d stumbled to the front door to let Pippa in, both of them still in their pajamas and Pippa not even bothering to take her shoes off when she hugged Lily, hard, there in the open door. The freezing air came in, little flurries of first-of-the-year snow coating the welcome mat and falling against their ankles.

When Lily pulled away, she felt a little more alive, like a real person living in her skin.

“He’s gone,” Lily whimpered. “He’s gone. Sammy said some fucking bullshit, and… look, do you want a drink? Uh…”

“Oh, Lily,” said Pippa. “You don’t have to play at hospitality with me. Just… look, let’s turn a couple lights on, open some blinds, c’mere.” She took Lily’s wrist and guided her into the living room, its sudden light so abrasive that Lily threw up an arm. Pippa lifted the blanket from the back of the sofa and tucked it around Lily’s shoulders.

“I’m not a child,” Lily grumbled, but she pulled it closer anyway. When Pippa settled on the couch, Lily maintained professional basis, even though they were friends first and coworkers second, even though Lily could still feel Pippa’s arms around her.

She didn’t remember if she closed the front door.

“It’s twice he’s run out of my life, vanished out of my life, fucking disappeared and left no way to…” It was a little easier to breathe, with tea in Lily’s system. A little easier to speak.

There wasn’t a shape of Jack, here, because Jack was never here.

“It wasn’t you. Whatever happened, it wasn’t your fault,” said Pippa.

“Well, duh, it wasn’t my fault. Jack can make his own choices. But I don’t know what happened and it kills me. Sammy said he was going to some town, I dunno, like he was on his way out the door, Jack _goddamn_ Wright.”

Pippa held her until she stopped shaking, while the light grew through the heavy blinds.

“Have you ever heard of King Falls?” Lily whispered at last.

“Rings a bell.” Pippa’s voice was so sweet and she was so close. Lily could kiss her, and it would ruin everything, but God, would it make the world half-okay for three seconds.

Lily said, instead, “Apparently that’s where Jack was on his way to before, poof, he wasn’t anywhere, just an idling car and shit packed for a long stay.”

“I don’t understand,” said Pippa. “He didn’t actually go anywhere?”

“Not according to Radio Genius Sammy Stevens.”

“Let’s look at the facts here,” says Pippa. “Tell me what you know.”

“I hate him,” said Lily, like a child.

“I know,” said Pippa, like a mother.

“Not Sammy, Pip. Jack. Seriously, fuck him. I don’t care where he is. Him and his dumb paranormal obsession and the fact that he never fucking thought about anyone else. Certainly not me, and not Sammy, either.”

And it was a small mercy that Pippa didn’t say, _You’re wrong,_ just got up to bring Lily a bowl of cereal and sat with her until the sun came all the way up and her hands didn’t look so much like ghosts in the light.

* * *

“We’ve been having this conversation for years,” says Pippa. She and Lily are testing the audio equipment in the studio basement of Pippa’s house, Lily in front of the mic saying _Testing, testing,_ like an amateur.

“Then you know my answer,” says Lily.

“And you keep getting older and tireder and carrying it around with you like a ball and chain.”

“I’m fine,” Lily tells her. “I’m gonna step back. Today’s a spit-flying day and I’m not ready to get your nice mic all germed-up.”

“Not a word. Also, I just got your levels,” Pippa complains, but Lily’s hand is already on the stand, adjusting it to her new position.

But they throw Lily off, Pippa’s words, keep her on edge as she runs through her notes.

“Record the segment again,” says Lily, a little later. “I’m gonna try hotter, harder, uh… sassier.”

“At least pretend you don’t get off saying unkind things to an audience of people who adore you.”

“I’m not—what? It’s not about them, or at least, the radio personality isn’t. It’s about having control of me, and… the story, too.”

“Reasonable,” says Pippa. “Nobody in the world could have more control of a story than you.”

But after Lily has reached her last full stop and taken a few breaths, Pippa says, “Wouldn’t it be good to get closure?”

If Lily hadn’t been looking for it, for Pippa’s next probing question, she might have stuttered. “Closure for what? A town can’t snatch somebody up from thousands of miles away. Call me a skeptic, but the world doesn’t work like that.”

“Don’t you want to know?” says Pippa.

“Not really.”

“You’re living like you put a BandAid on a broken bone, Lily. I know it’s… well, losing a sibling is rough. But you don’t know he’s dead gone.”

“No, I don’t know where he is, and that’s worse than pretty much anything else I can imagine. Don’t play the sympathy card when you don’t know what it’s like to lose someone who was your other half and not know what in the world you lost him to.”

“Lily,” says Pippa, tireless, patient, deserving of so much more than the shit Lily puts her through every day. Her face is strained, blue light on the sharp lines of her cheeks. Lily hates how beautiful she is, how soft and how severe.

Maybe that is why Lily says what she says next.

“Pippa,” says Lily. “Jack is mine to grieve however I see fit. If you want to fly your ass to King fucking Falls, you can do it on vacation time, ‘kay? Here, I’ll give you some vacation time now.”

“Watch it.” Pippa’s voice is little more than a growl.

“What do you want, a week? A month? Take however much you want. It’s just us, here, and an intern who doesn’t want to be stuck with our bickering asses because your heart’s not in anything we cover, because it’s not your idyllic little dream town.”

Pippa gives a short, incredulous laugh. “ _My_ heart’s not in it? Lil, have you seen yourself?”

“Don’t fucking _Lil_ me.”

“You find a drug cartel in King Falls and I’ll be in. A secret cult of nannies sustaining the town’s underground dog-fighting ring.”

“Your mind, Lily.”

Lily levels her with a radio-proof stare, and Pippa matches her with a radio-proof eyebrow raise.

Pippa says, “I’m not setting this up again tomorrow, Lily, so just finish it up already.”

Lily runs it, her voice harsher than it would have been. She is talking straight through Pippa to the cut-out of Jack, still in the corner of every room.

Pippa says, “That’s no good,” as if it’s a matter of technique and not the result of Pippa riling Lily up.

And she’s not done. “That’s what we do, _Lil,_ uncover the dark sides of towns. Where better to go than a place that wears its dark side like you wear those bags under your eyes.”

Lily doesn’t need a mirror to tell her about the exhaustion that hovers over her, that drags her eyes down after four travel mugs of coffee, that pulls her away from Pippa’s patient expression while organizing notes. That drove her to set up Wright On the first time, all alone in the house and a sea wider than anything and hungry, watching her with white teeth.

The day Sammy and Jack up and left, their taillights chased out of the city like a frightened dog, the ocean dark in the Atlantic sunset, Lily went swimming. She was cold in her one-piece and the ocean was cold in the dark, and the sand her feet churned up stung her eyes.

She swam until the shore was a fairy tale on the horizon and she started thinking about riptides, about currents and the telltale signs she couldn’t see from inside. Overhead the stars shone like light on gums in the dentist’s chair, like curettes; in the distance, high rise buildings glowed in a wash of hazy orange, and Lily thought about the first house she lived in, a proper house with an L-shaped sofa around a fireplace and her mother singing, which was, of course, where Jack got it from, and some part of Lily knowing what home meant, without anyone having to tell her.

Those lights never went out, and Lily found her way back to shore. She walked home barefoot, with a towel around her shoulders and her hair dripping all over her shivering body. She unlocked a door which was hers alone and locked it behind her, Jack clinging to her in the saltwater that dropped all over the kitchen floor.

Pippa is looking at her like she wants to say something else, there in her basement, so Lily says, “There’s nothing to uncover, then.”

“It’s like someone really, really wants us to cover it.”

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Lily deadpans. The things you don’t face become ghosts and pass through you, quiet as fingernails on cloth.

“Well,” says Pippa, perfectly reasonably, and in that moment Lily hates her for it. “We’re not a supernatural podcast. We cover nitty gritty real-world shit. We don’t touch ghosts. You don’t believe in ghosts, of course, so it wouldn’t make for riveting podcasting, you debunking the supernatural in every way you can think of.”

“Because it’s not real, Pippa,” Lily says.

“So why all the fan emails? Why the handwritten letters?”

“Nobody types letters anymore. They just send emails.”

Pippa says, “I’m not playing around, Lily. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

Lily’s throat is sore and she doesn’t know why. “I don’t believe in conspiracies.”

“Everyone knows what you believe and don’t believe in,” Pippa says. “You don’t exactly keep your bias out of your journalism.”

“Yeah,” Lily rasps, “‘cause objective journalism is a sham designed to trick the unsuspecting masses into believing someone’s bad opinions are the truth.”

“Then get out there and put an end to these King Falls conspiracies once and for all.”

* * *

And in that old three-bedroom down on the Gulf Coast, the sea four blocks away and Jack always home from early-morning runs with the smell of sand and salt on him, Lily is screaming her throat raw. She is livewire, tripwire, burning volcanic, and Jack is not looking at her.

She is trying to make him look at her, but her voice gets hoarser and hoarser and his eyes look down or at Sammy, always at Sammy, like Sammy is a sandbag between Jack and the riptide that is Lily.

She can sense that is an end, a chapter with a mile of blank space under the last line, a page-turn disorienting as a wave taking her under. Sammy is pulling suitcases two at a time to the front door and throwing them out.

Jack is saying, _We can’t live here like this,_ and maybe he is talking about her alone. He is in the bay window, gesturing at a building across the street which represents, in retrospect, the whole city. The whole state, the South and the coast, any place Lily could find with a pin on the map.

But she says, anyway, _If you’re so desperate to leave, be my guest. You know where the door is._

He is saying, a last-minute moment of apology, _It’s not our fault the station manager hired us._

 _Tell me whose fault what is when you’re not halfway out the door,_ snarls Lily, and, oh, it aches all the way down. _I seem to recall you had no reason to apply for jobs all the way across the country, jobs that will jeopardize the last inch of journalistic integrity you two have left._

Jack says, _I don’t know how to explain myself in a way you’ll understand, and, frankly, Lily, I don’t want to._

Jack is gentle compared to Sammy. Sammy’s eyes are dark as a summer storm. He says, _Don’t bother calling us, either._

And she gets the last word, the last _Fuck you_ thrown at a closing door, all their suitcases packed and loose belongings shoved into reusable grocery bags, because no one has time to call a mover. She stands in the lot and watched Jack’s car disappears around the corner. And then she’s left with the shape of the car, the shape of the suitcases, the shape of the ocean and no one to look out at it with.

* * *

She closes down. She compartmentalizes. She stops talking about Jack with Pippa, but sometimes she talks of him anyway, because you don’t go over twenty-five years with a person as close to your heart than your own veins without the memories sticking, if nothing else.

She stops keeping him like a secret, like bruised ribs hidden under a thick sweater, and starts keeping him like a dead pet. He was there, and then he wasn’t. Here is the before Jack; here the during; here the after, and here is Lily, who has seen it all.

When her interns do their research, dig up her history, Google Shotgun Sammy, she sees Pippa’s eyes jump to hers, but her breath stays even. She doesn’t let the radio persona down for a second. She is not going to be the girl who lost her brother. She is not going to let anyone see her eyes and say _grief._

She is waiting for Pippa to challenge her, to say, _Forgetting already?_ just so she can retort, _Try and stop me._

The Pippa in Lily’s head is always crueler than the Pippa who keeps her in line in the recording studio.

Lily does her job better than she ever has, polishes stories in record time, runs segments over and over to cover every idea that pops into her head.

Most importantly, Lily is sober. It’s easy to drink, but work comes first, always, and Lily is nothing if not professional. It is too easy to think of her brother with gin or Riesling in her system, too easy to mistake the liquor’s warmth for comfort, too easy to dread the apartment she goes home to, never his but not really hers, either. Not yet. But it will be.

* * *

Lily is this close to firing Pippa and finding a new producer. From the looks of it, Pippa is just about as close to leaving Lily to the elements, without a show or at least without one anybody would pick up. These are the sort of threats Pippa levels at Lily, which is how Lily knows it’s personal.

But she’s Lily fucking Wright. She doesn’t back down, and she doesn’t lose.

Pippa plays the voicemails on her phone for Lily while their new intern Mike is in the room, and only Lily’s standards of professionalism keep her from storming out. Most callers address Pippa as ‘Wright On,’ but some of them are clever enough to use her name, and thus not implicate Lily. By now, Lily is used to these antics, familiar with the way Pippa draws Mike into the possibility of the mystery of a lifetime, but it doesn’t mean Lily likes them.

The quiet intimacy of anger is easier to navigate than these cluttered confrontations Pippa keeps setting up. Pippa knows her, knows how to field a lapse in professionalism when the mics are off, but with an intern in the room, the waters change.

“This isn’t a conversation to have here,” Lily says. It’s just after a recording session, and Lily is sitting on the floor beneath the mic while Pippa and Mike put the equipment away. Pippa has her headphones over one ear, the static of a thick voice coming out of her phone beside the laptop.

Pippa’s voice sounds warbled, the way a voice sounds on a mountaintop. “I think it is, Lily. I think we need a third perspective.”

“Um,” says the intern. “What am I weighing in on?”

“King Falls, mystery hotspot, Grand Central of haunted America,” says Pippa. “Ever heard of it?”

“Oh my God, Pippa, we’re not putting it to a vote,” says Lily, but she stretches her legs out anyway. She’s not going anywhere. This isn’t a fight to let lie. “I get to have a say in it too.”

“You’ve had plenty of says. Let me talk now.”

Mike says, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever come across the name.”

There is no end to Pippa’s saved voicemails, and she keeps playing them while Mike gets more and more starry-eyed. Or maybe just exhausted. Lily can work with exhausted.

“I’m just saying,” says Pippa, with exaggerated casualness, “I think they might be on to something. And who are you, Lily, to refuse the hero’s call of a significant portion of your viewership?”

“Low,” says Lily. “So low.”

“But true, and you can’t deny it,” says Pippa, innocent as anything.

“I can’t deny that you’re an idiot,” says Lily. The expression in Pippa’s eyes says she knows what Lily knows: that Lily is running out of ammunitions.

“You can’t deny I’m a genius,” says Pippa anyway.

“Hey, Intern,” says Lily, looking up at Pippa and not at him. Lily is making expressions at Pippa that Pippa is not reacting to, and Lily’s blood is a little too hot.

“It’s Mike,” the intern grumbles. He has quick eyes and a quicker smile, which reminds Lily of Jack in college, which, of course, reminds Lily of how long ago that was. So maybe there’s a part of her that wants to fire him before she acknowledges it.

She says, “Why don’t you gather info about the town? We wouldn’t want to go in unprepared.”

Pippa’s eyes shine. Her hand falls on Lily’s shoulder, phone forgotten beside her laptop. Lily swats it away.

“I never said yes, and even if I do, I’d only be doing this for you,” says Lily. Pippa doesn’t stop looking at her like that.

Mike says, “So that’s a wrap?”

Pippa must nod while Lily busies herself looking at her knuckles, because he stretches and opens the door.

“Remember, ghosts,” Pippa calls after him.

After the door shuts behind Mike and his car disappears around the corner, Lily rises and slams Pippa’s laptop shut. “You bastard.”

Pippa, to her credit, doesn’t jump. She raises her hands in surrender, her phone screen dark in one hand. The room is a little brighter, the shadows beneath them a little farther away the way pedestrians look from a skyscraper. Lily climbs to her feet and zips her jacket all the way to her chin.

“I know what you’re up to.”

“Good,” says Pippa. She puts the laptop in its case and gathers into orderly piles the cords laid out across the ground.

“You’re… what? You’re not supposed to say that.”

“Why not? My takeaway is this means you’ll at least give it a chance, so we both win.”

Lily’s hand clenches into a fist, and she holds it stiffly at her side. The basement is too small, the overhead too yellow, her legs too stiff from sitting on the ground. “I wish you didn’t make it so hard for me to be glad for a reason to…”

“To look for him,” says Pippa.

“To look around,” says Lily, flatly. “See what I see. Ask some locals some questions. About King Falls, Pip, not about Jack, who didn’t, by the way, actually go to this town you’re so enamored of. I do this completely, one-hundred-percent on my terms. We’re doing a story; we’re not hunting missing persons. But… you’re right about something, at least. It’ll be good to know, either way.”

“Have it your way.”

Lily says, “I will, and so will you.”

* * *

And the town, dark when they arrive, a heavy forest with a gravel two-way road, headlights falling on patches of stone and trees with moss growing from all directions. They have their recorder running, Lily and the Wright On team. Lily narrates her impressions of the drive through a forest much deeper than it has any right to be based on the map Lily has on her lap. GPS doesn’t work this far off the beaten path; it had been stumbling for at least a dozen miles along Route 72 before they turned into the woods. Nobody suggests tuning into local radio, Lily least of all.

They’ve been to a lot of small towns, places so dark at night the only distinction between their skin and the sky is the multitude of stars.

One day, when Lily signs of on Wright On for the very last time, she thinks she’d like to stay somewhere like this. Somewhere so far off the beaten path she’d have to rely on newspapers, no sound in her head but the tiny murmur of her thoughts, the babble of some brook, a breeze turning maple leaves red as pricked fingers into piles on the lawn. To have a simple life, a computer that doesn’t always work, old newspapers used for firewood in the hearth, three pairs of worn-out shoes on a welcome mat she bought with someone she loved.

She’d like to stay somewhere like this, but not here.

Somewhere, beyond this forest, Sammy Stevens is broadcasting through the town and the surrounding area. Somewhere Jack, but not here, because anyone who intended to hitchhike halfway across the country wouldn’t have left the mess he left. Somewhere hope: a lake too deep to swim to the bottom, but dark enough to try; a grocery story filled with people who know her name but not because she fought for it; a sun rising over the mountains, catching on snow-tipped peaks, falling on Lily’s hands on the wheel as she steers into a life she does not know yet will be hers.


End file.
